I am writing one this summer on my early years in the United States Forest Service—when I was 17 and the Service was 14.13 I have finally got it rolling and I think it will be good, but I am afraid it is going to be too long. Too many things happened when I was in the Service. I don’t want the strain of writing some thing that is long. Would that I could, like you, write a beautiful poem.
As always,
Norman
Oct. 20, 1972
Marie, my dear,
Thanks for your note about your mother, and don’t be discouraged because your mother is slow in regaining her strength. Once not too long ago I think you told me she is 79, but, even if she were younger, she has been sick. I spent 4 of the first 6 or 7 months of 1970 in the hospital, and I was a good year getting in shape again. They used to try to cheer me up by telling me about an experiment they ran in World War II to see what would happen to young tough guys (all soldiers) who weren’t sick but just had to stay in bed for a month. They could eat anything they wanted and as much. The only thing they could not do was get out of bed for a month.
They were over six months recovering.
So, be patient, Marie. You have been saturated with good health all your life, but your mother is your mother and she is tough, too. Things inside me tell me she will be well again. But keep me informed.
So you’re giving a course in modern poetry to 80 students. Yale hasn’t changed much since the month I was there when I was a senior at Dartmouth (1924). Then, too, they brought down the fancy university professors to lecture to big classes of undergraduates. I remember Berdan, Tinker and Phelps.14 Tinker was lecturing—of all things—on the Romantic poets. He had a birthmark on the left side of his face so he sat so that the undergraduates could see only his right profile. He read poetry well and he read lots of it and made easy remarks about the lives of the Romantic poets. I remember going to see Berdan in his office once. It was in the basement and it was a dark day and he was not a very successful member of the faculty. In the semi-darkness he talked to me for nearly an hour about how individuals come and go but the institution (that is, Yale) goes on forever. All of which turned out to be true. Phelps was a God damn fool who made a lot of money and taught Browning and was highly thought of by the Yale undergraduates. I remember him spending 20 minutes showing his class of 80 what Browning meant by his line referring to his wife as “his moon of poets,” so the moon doesn’t rotate so the world sees only one side of her. Then very slowly he walked sideways around the lecture room, saying every once in a while, “Please notice, you still can see only my stomach.”
Have no fear, Marie, my dear, even if you are to be compared to these early greats of the Yale English Dept., you must truly be great in this setting, even if, as that Yale undergraduate once told me, my teaching suspiciously resembles yours.
It is always nice to hear from you.
As ever,
Norman
Nov. 3, 1972
Marie, my dear,
I was certainly glad to get your letter and to learn that your mother is beginning to feel her biceps again. It is a terrible thing to be old and a terrible thing to be sick at any age. I think that she does well to be back in action this soon, and I am real proud of her and you must let me know how things go with her. But to be loved when she is old is to have over half of the battle won. [. . .]
Thanks so much for your comments about my “stories.” I am sure your criticisms are well taken: I must have great limitations as a story-teller. Then, too, my only experience has been in the oral tradition, telling stories to my children and always swapping them with my western pals. Even your children or your pals aren’t going to listen to you for more than 10 or 15 minutes, so there is great premium on deletion, and especially of all scenery. Besides, they know the scenery. All you have to say is “the Blackfoot river.”
Maybe the one I wrote (but did not finish) this summer will please you more, at least on this account. It is about the early years I spent in the Forest Service which, however, was younger than I was. It was only 14, and I was 17, but we had many of the same characteristics. The story is even more raucous than “My Pal, Jim,” but it does try to do something that I didn’t try to do in the stories you have read—it tries to say directly how I feel about the mountains of Idaho and Montana and to make these feelings a dramatic part of the “story.” Not easy, my dear. When you tell “stories,” you had better not try to pull the two into one, as possibly is suggested by my opening sentence: “I was young and I thought I was tough and I knew it was beautiful and I was a little but crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.” I’ll finish it in the winter quarter, when I don’t teach. It will probably be 80 pages, but if you don’t mind, I’ll send you a copy.
Marie, my dear, I am teaching a course this quarter called “Poem, Poet, and Period,” and the other day I gave the class each a copy of “Floating” and talked about you and they very much like both “the Poem” and “the Poet.” If you have 80 this year in your class on Modern Poetry, next year you’ll have at least 100, 20 of whom will be visitors from the Middle West, expecting you to be swimming on your back in Triplets.
By the way, I perhaps should tell you that in my Forest Service story I have a rather wonderful whore-house scene, including a whore who speaks in iambic pentameter.
As a big academic administrator, can’t you find some excuse to visit us with no expense to yourself and with great pleasure and profit to us? [. . .]
Be sure to keep me informed about your mother.
As ever,
Norman
Jan. 21, 1973
Marie, my dear,
It does me good to hear from you. There’s everything in your letters—brains, warm-heartedness, humor, poetry (not just about poetry but also a little of the same). And, by the way, you haven’t sent me a poem for a long time—nothing since “Floating,” and you can’t have been swimming on your back ever since. I trust I told you I liked “Floating” very much, but you must have tried the breast or crawl stroke since then, so let’s take a look at it. Yes, and when I finish (if ever) this story I am working on now I’ll join you in trying to get something published. [. . .]
I can’t quite figure out the dates from your letter, but you may be in Florida while I write this. I hope so. And I hope the sun shines upon you, and that must be a good place to go floating. Write “Floating II: A Southern Version.” And I hope your blessed mother continues to improve. And do you know something else? I am going to Florida this Saturday and spend a couple of weeks with Mr. Kimpton, former chancellor of the University. He has a car down there and we are going to spend most of the time on the Keys, which we both like very much. If I go on much longer in the letter, I’ll never get there.
Sure, I’ll send you the story I am working on now when I finish it (hopefully before I have to start teaching in the spring quarter). It is going to be quite long (100 pages?) but I think it will be better as well as longer than anything I have done (whatever that means). It’s rougher than the others but also I hope more beautiful, or it should be because it is about my early years in the United States Forest Service. Its tentative title:
USFS
The Ranger, the Cook and Wonderland
“And then he thinks he knows the hills where his life arose . . .”
—Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life”
Next year sounds wonderful. When I get back from Florida, let’s get to work planning some performance for you in Chicago.
As ever,
Norman
[postcard]
Seeley Lake, Montana 59868
July 28, 1973
Dear Marie,
I’m glad you like my story on the early Forest Service. Send it along when you can—I’m still working on it, but want to get started on something new in a week or ten days. The card of Boothbay Harbor is beautiful. You should provide me with every copy of “Floating” and vice versa.
How’s your mother?
As ever,
Norman
[postcard]
Seeley Lake, Montana 59868
August 23, 1973
Dear Marie, (I’ve misplaced your Maine address)
Thanks for your wonderful letter about my story which I shall reply to fully in a day or so. I will disallow for love and friendship, but I also think it’s a pretty good story, and it happened long ago. The goat on the postcard is a lot like my goat in the story—looking for trouble from below where it usually comes. I am sorry you can’t come to Chicago, but I will continue to love you.
Norman
Seeley Lake, Montana 59868
Sept. 18, 1973
Marie, my dear,
As the final spiritual act, as it were, of the summer, this short letter to you. I just put away the story I have been working on, and I won’t pull it out again until I get to Chicago. Instead, after lunch, I’ll start folding up the cabin for the winter, and that’s always a 3 or 4 (or 5) day job. Then, I’ll spend a week or so with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law in Helena, old mining country that I like very much and so do my relatives. We have become pseudo-experts on old mining towns and methods, and tour the back country in a half-ton truck.
Early this summer the vice-president of a Helena bank gave me an old gold pan, and, no kidding, Marie, on the first pan I showed quite a bit of “color.” One flake was so large it almost qualified as a “nugget,” but didn’t quite. Old-timers defined nuggets as follows: they tinkle when you drop them on the pan. I couldn’t hear mine, but it’s a good-sized flake.
Marie, I know you are an old violinist but I think you would like to go mining. If nothing else, it’s kind of wonderful to see the bumps of the world from the open box of a half-ton truck. Ever since I can remember, the half-ton truck has been my favorite mode of transportation.
And how the hell did I get here? Maybe this letter is an act of the spirit, as I said at the outset, but it looks as if it isn’t going to have any brains or guiding principles. I was going to start by thanking you for your wonderful criticism of my story and instead started telling you how to tell a nugget. Maybe that isn’t so far off the subject anyway, because I certainly value everything you say about what I say. I was especially touched by the fact that you like the movement of the story as a whole—the story of seeing for the first time life becoming a story. Most people to make me feel good, praise this or that piece of it—the forest fire, the fight, etc., but oddly you and Rebecca Roberts, the poet-girl from South Carolina who is here again at the Lake this summer, made me feel best of all about it by seeing what it all meant to me. Rebecca said, “You know, I feel the story is me. I’m 17 years old, too, and for the first time I see my life this summer becoming a story.” Bless her heart, I think she is in love with some Sears-and-Roebuck cowboy who works over at the Ranger Station.
But I am grateful, too, for your detailed criticisms and suggestions. And I am especially grateful for your help with my phonetics, which are nil. Now the sentence reads: “On the next map of the Forest Service, it all appeared as one word and a final e had been added which henceforward was pronounced, and the a had been made in Boston. Now, it doesn’t mean anything but be sure you pronounce it right: We/tas/se Creek, just as if its headwaters are on Beacon Hill.”15 OK?
I spent a lot more time this summer reworking this Forest Service story than I had intended to—back at the beginning of the summer and again at the very end. I must feel a bit about it the way that you feel about “Floating”—that is has a lot of meaning to you but you haven’t got it out quite the way you want it so you can’t keep your hands off it. I have another similar feeling about it and “Floating”—they are getting better.
I started another story this summer, but didn’t get far with it. As you pointed out in your remarks. My stories go in heavily for “know-how.” Nothing is more beautiful to me than people doing things who know how to do them. This story aims before it finishes to give the reader a pretty complete picture of the art of fly-fishing and, so far, that is its title, although of course as usual it has a whore or two in it and as usual my father, who was a fine fly-fisherman, and my brother, who was the best in the northwest. And, negatively, Izaak Walton, who as you may know was a bait-fisherman which, as you may also know, is the bottom of the ladder in the eyes of a good fly-fisherman. As my father used to tell my brother and me when we were boys: “Izaak Walton is not a respectable writer.” I hope to finish it around Xmas, and will send you a copy. [. . .]
Yes, Marie, that’s right—send out “Floating” but don’t say anything about it unless somebody agrees to publish it. Anyway, that’s what I am going to do with USFS 1919.
I was delighted to hear that your mother is back in business, just as feisty and fast-on-her-feet as ever. She is relatively immortal.
I am enclosing a couple of postcards that I know I have sent you before, but this is the way my country looks right now. It gets its particular autumn coloration from the fact that it has the greatest tamarack (larch) stand in the world—and tamarack, as you know, are the only needle-bearing trees whose needles turn yellow in the autumn—and finally drop off. And it is autumn here—in a big way. Yesterday morning it was 19° at my window when I got up. It snowed first on Aug. 31, and 4 days ago it snowed all day. Everything green was white, except the Lake which was black and you couldn’t see across it. [. . .]
As ever,
Norman
[P.S.] No wonder I can’t get a story finished when I write letters this long.
[postcard]
September 18, 1973
Marie, my dear, the photograph for this card was taken right in front of my cabin. Right in front of my cabin, too, are 2 beaver who have been building a house all summer (see spot marked X). Under the guest cabin in the rear are a skunk and 3 kittens. She was here last year, too, and we have become very good friends. I hope some summer to tame one of her kittens enough to bring it back to Chicago. I would love to walk across the University campus with it following me as a pet. I have several people in mind whom I should like to meet.
April 16, 1976
Marie, dear,
Almost as soon as you left Chicago I did, too—for Washington, D.C., where I am staying with my son and working on the files of the United States Forest Service on a tragic forest fire of 1949 which is to be the base of my next long story.
But I did stay in Chicago for several days after you left and heard everyone say what a smash-hit you had been.16 Everybody. You are wasting your talents staying in one place and being the first woman professor of anything. You should be riding the circuit like an old-time Methodist minister preaching and giving inspirational messages on the Logos as revealed in the New Testament including the Book of Wallace Stevens and other insurance agents.
I hadn’t more than turned around at O’Hare Field and started for town before I missed you, and in another (and very beautiful) town. I still miss you. Don’t be gone so long next time.
As ever and ever,
Norman
April 22, 1976
Marie, dear,
I returned yesterday from over a week in Washington and found your sweet letter plus a couple of poems you wrote long ago when you were a red-headed chick teaching in Smith College (I would guess) and using such eastern women’s college words as “caudle” (to rhyme with “dawdle”), “native dower” and “deeming.” I won’t go on, because you can pick them out yourself. But I like the whole poem, and now and then it is flawless and moving:
As I said, this is flawless Shaping the inward welter in subjection Under one will, of hazardous election, The accused accuser, to its own impulse traitor, Reluctant witness and adjudicator.
But right before these lines is the line
A more instructed selfhood hardly winning.
If you were writing the poem now, of course, it wouldn’t show the effect of commuting between Smith and Yale every other day. Maybe you can still make something of it. As you know now, you can’t write a tender poem unless it is clean and
tough. Do you remember offhand Sir Walter Raleigh’s “To His Son” and James Joyce’s “A Flower Given to My Daughter” [“my blueveined child”] and “Ecce Puer”? They mean more to me than any other poems written to children.
Yes, I think that soon you should go back to writing poems with some regularity, in so far as poems are subject to this treatment. You have a gift. The vein is genuine and deep—no one of us knows now how wide it is, but that may make no difference. It has to be mined to be productive. It won’t even add to your inner life if it is left buried—it probably will only mess you up. If I were you, I wouldn’t wait until I had finished the book on the American poets17 before trying your own thing for an hour or so a day, even if most of it for a while is just doing your exercises. It’s an art, and they can talk all they want to about an art being in your head or heart but a lot of it has to be in your bones so you can do it without thinking of more than a little part of it. Of course, it takes a lot of thinking and fooling around before you can do it that way. You know, you used to put yourself through school teaching the piano. [. . .]
As ever, and ever,
Norman
[P.S.] Isn’t that a lovely line, “My blueveined child.” Be sure to reread those poems.
Christmas 1980
Dear Marie:
No one can say either of us spent much of 1980 in writing each other, but I think I haven’t entirely lost the knack, because I hope by the end of the winter to have fairly well completed the long forest fire story that I long have been working on, and I hope that you can still read, because I don’t publish, even on forest fires, without your permission. So by spring, be prepared. It has been hard work.
Marie, while you are still a young chick, do all the big things you are going to do, because beyond a certain age almost anything big is almost too big.
I hope you are continuing with your critical and linguistic studies and I especially like your combination of the two. I will always regard your essays on Frost and Marianne Moore as classics. Did I ever tell you I knew both of them a little—I even took Marianne out a couple of evenings—she was small, fey, and impudent, and knew a great deal about baseball, especially about the Brooklyn Dodgers. She really knew a great deal about the Brooklyn Dodgers, and soon you will know a great deal about forest fires. Most of all, don’t ever give up your poetry. Maybe your poetic gift is not as deep as the ocean, but it is a clear and beautiful stream. (How is your mother?)
The Norman Maclean Reader Page 30